Wednesday mailbag

Well, we don't usually get enough mail here in Chancery Hill to need an actual mailbag, but often enough we do feel sorry for the mail carrier who ends up lugging around some of the things that get delivered here. Last week, for example, he brought me a copy of Henry Petrie's 1848 Monumenta Historica Britannica, weighing in at about fifteen pounds and standing about 16" tall. It's not the largest and heaviest book I've had, but nearly so.

1st communion souvenir, 1898.

Today, however, the load was lighter, with just two items. The smaller, about the size of a 3x5 index card, is a little manuscript item on vellum. It is a souvenir from a young person's first communion in 1898, and as I think the picture shows, it is written and illuminated in such a way as to be reminiscent of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The inks here are somewhat faded and worn, and I think there may be some discolored silver used, as well as gold.

The second item that was delivered today is forty years younger, but still more than eighty years old: not a true antique yet, but getting there. This is an 8x10 glossy promotional photo, showing The Ritz Brothers, in their 1938 feature film, Kentucky Moonshine. 

1938 Promo photo, to be reproduced in newspapers:
Kentucky Moonshine.

The Ritz Brothers never made it quite as big as the Marx brothers, but according to the brief Wikipedia plot summary for this film, they dress up as hillbillies in order to get discovered by a theatrical producer, presumably giving them a chance during the film to show off their singing, dancing, and comedy chops. 

Usually, the oddball stuff that comes in the mail is for me, but this promotional photo will probably end up being reproduced in Rosemary's forthcoming book on the figure of the "Mountaineer." 

And then, presumably, it will end up in one of our collections. 

New Acquisitions: Lobby Cards

Pearl Sindelar, Guy Coombs, and Dorothy Kelly, ca. 1912

One of the great things about having a business selling both books and antiques is that there's not really anything old I can't buy and at least try to sell, if it catches my eye. It's good to have a focus, I suspect, but it's good, too, to be able to gather things that make me happy. And it's fun to share them, as well.

So recently, I came a cross a big stack of forty or fifty lobby cards from the 1920s, including a few headshot-posters from around 1912. I am pretty accustomed to seeing lobby cards from the 1940s and 50s and 60s at antique malls and stores, but these are earlier than the ones I usually see, and they give a kind of fun view of how movies were marketed and promoted in the silent era. And it was a useful reminder that the history of Hollywood movies is indeed over a century old, now.

A Cafe in Cairo

Of course, these movies were generally shown in black and white (some early movies were augmented by hand-coloring on the projected film stock, but I don't think any of the ones discussed here were). But the lobby cards themselves are marvelously colorful, and of course they all date from before the Hays production code, so they can occasionally be just the tiniest bit risque. In the card advertising A Cafe in Cairo, Priscilla Dean is giving the pith-helmeted fellow a look that seems to leave him perplexed, or worse.



Rosemary, glancing through these, noted how conventionalized the pose was in which the woman leans her head far back as if to both invite and resist the possibility of a kiss. In the last example, from the lobby card for Thy Name is Woman, the soldier seems uncertain about whether a kiss upon the very point of her chin is even worth the effort.

Leaning back a little.

Farthest.

A little farther back.

Anyhow, the whole batch was quite fun to sort through, a reminder that you don't need to know everything about something when you buy it: in fact, you can't know everything about everything. Sometimes it's all about buying what you like, and learning about it afterwords.